Once again there has been a complete lack of updates for another week. I’m not having any luck rendering screencasts to the proper codec in Linux. On top of that I’ve had enough of Ubuntu and am searching for a new distribution to use.
I installed OpenSUSE 11.1 and didn’t like it at all. A default install has quite a large memory footprint and everything seems sluggish. I started shutting useless services down but I still seem to be experiencing sluggish performance.
I’m not looking at Arch Linux. The install is very basic and then you customize the system to suit your needs. This is probably not advisable for new Linux users, as it leaves everything to the user, but I think it will allow me to have control over my system as I want to.
Hopefully the install goes well but it might take a bit so for the next few days so don’t expect any updates. If I get it working I’ll have a write-up on it and my review.
On another note on top of needing to get my machine working again like I want it too I also need to learn how to do some Visual Basic programming. I’ve used it many years ago but it’s been a very long time. I don’t like VB but I can use it when I have to. The reason for me trying to use it again is that for work I’ve been tasked with researching and finding a good PDF library/API. We have an in-house piece of software that runs much of the business and they want to use PDF to create reports for decision makers. So to do any kind of testing and to get an idea of how the API’s work I need to learn VB again. On top of this there is a “tentative” (read it as definite) deadline of a week.
I think I have my work cut out for me and I might have to let this blog lack more updates because of this.
Related posts:
- Quick Update There has been no updates on this blog for about...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
One Response to “Lack of Updates”
At my office we use PrinceXML now for pdf tasks. Basically it’s an acid 2 compliant html/xhtml -> pdf program.
Bad news is it’s NOT open source and does have a hefty one time price (with support fee if you want).
Good news is it written by some smart people and works REALLY well. It installs nicely, comes in a deb package (or many others, Mac + Windows also) (it also does work on our Hardy and Feisty Ubuntu servers). Basically it’s “render this html page with this css file” and you’re done. Might not be exactly what you’re shooting for, but if you already have website pages with the content you need to pdf this is PERFECT, or if the added benefit of not learning a new API and getting html versions of documents is a plus it’s pretty great too.
We use it with the Princely rails plugin (on github, rails plugin is open sourced) to print orders, check requests etc on our back end site.